Boulevard Voltaire, No. 102. Fourth floor. Posted on the opposite sidewalk, I look at the windows that are still lit. A game of lights on the fourth floor. They’re turned off, turned back on, turned off, and turned on again. I interpret, I analyze. The wholesalers close their shops and look at me strangely. It’s 8:00; the door slams. His silhouette between the trees; he’s limping slightly in a raincoat, a small bag in his hand. I let him go in front and set off a few yards behind him on the other side of the boulevard.
Place Léon Blum. I sneak between the people out getting some air. I pass by our cafés; he stops in front of a window and leaves again. Am I the only one who sees Jan, his mass under the raincoat, his dangling arms, his gray head? He feels his pockets, the telephone. He sits down on a bench to answer. I can only see his back. He’s moving his hands, turning his head. The voice, the words, I don’t even need to hear them. The voice is present, the words are present, and the missing one is sitting here, on the bench on boulevard Voltaire. He leaves again.
In this pursuit, I become clear, transparent.
I rejoice, all-powerful. I am his shadow.
He has passed rue de Charonne. He continues toward Nation. He suddenly crosses. I stop suddenly, half-hidden by a tree trunk. I laugh to myself; some detective I am. On the corner of rue des Immeubles-Industriels, he sits down in the terrasse of a café. My hideout is becoming hard to hold onto. I retreat. He’s alone and I call him on the phone to amuse myself. I see him take out the telephone, look at it, hesitate, and pick up.
He doesn’t even give me time to speak.
“I’m still at the office, I’ll call you back. I love you mademoiselle madame.”
I can’t even respond because he has already put the telephone back in his pocket. I hide against a door. Huddled in the doorway, numb, I tremble.
I see a couple walking toward Jan. He folds up his newspaper, stands to greet them, and hugs each one. The man is short, sturdy, dressed without too much effort, and the woman has blonde hair put up in a twist. They have hardly sat down before all three of them launch into a lively conversation. Jan makes big gestures, they laugh. The woman moves sensuously on her chair and crosses her impeccable legs against the table. They toast.
The woman takes out some papers that all three of them quickly consult. Jan seems to be pointing to one sheet, one line. The man answers. They take turns signing. The man puts the papers back in his own bag, stands up, cordially shakes Jan’s hand, and the woman gives a little sign with her head and stays seated. Jan signals to the server who returns with two glasses. The woman places the strands of hair back into her chignon and holds her glass against Jan’s. They moisten their lips. The woman gently caresses Jan’s cheek. He grabs her hand and kisses her in the hollow of her wrist. They drink again. They laugh. The woman stands up, dusting off the coat draped in swirls around her body. Jan has stood up to say goodbye to her. He towers over her because of his height and makes her laugh; she leaves, taking long strides in the direction of rue des Immeubles-Industriels.
He leaves a bill on the table and the server tells him goodbye, the tray plastered against his stomach.
Jan leaves in the direction of place de la République. He walks slowly on the sidewalk on boulevard Voltaire; he looks at the winter plane trees, their branches hung with the brown hulls of dormant fruit. I catch my breath a few yards behind him, my steps in his. The cell phone against my ear, I call him, I ring him, and he continues on. The telephone is vibrating against his chest, I know it. He is moving farther away.
He turns right onto the street that runs the length of the Saint-Ambroise church. The telephone rings. Jan is no longer answering. I see him disappear behind the church’s white stones.
On my finger, I twirl my cheap ring.
Air, wind, let’s forget, let’s live.
3
SOMETIMES, WHEN I FOLLOWED the streets I’d known since childhood—and I don’t know how suddenly it happened or if I had to call upon, more or less consciously, different layers of temporal perception inside my brain—the street I was walking on would all of a sudden become, in its proportions, colors, and geographic insertions, exactly the one I used to see when I was a child.
It was a brief but overwhelming experience in which the topographic landmarks of the past would submerge those of a different time.
There was one rather common symptom—everything appeared taller, higher, and more threatening—but the most spectacular part of this spatio-temporal fault that I was earnestly falling into was that I lost the sense of how the streets were divided up, even though it had been inscribed in me by force of habit. My sense of what connected the streets to each other, what constituted a trajectory, a path, and what fueled my construction of space and my own presence in that space—once again, not simply in terms of the scale, an unchanging principle, but also as far as my movement within that space was concerned—were all nourished by this archaic way of seeing, to the point that my sense of orientation was no longer “up to date” and no longer found itself guided by anything but my old childhood landmarks.
Once more, I saw the street and everything along it the way I saw it at the age of eight. It was like another city, familiar and yet strange. I was afraid of getting lost and losing my balance, the path, my head. I had to use all my strength—just like at the bottom of the water when you’re almost out of breath, on the brink of suffocation, and you slam your heel down before coming back to the surface—to recover my adult perceptions, serene and closed down.
But it still existed within me, like a supernatural power lying in wait in a buried cavity: this subterranean topography that I could hoist to the surface of my consciousness and then plunge back into the depths whenever I liked, in a strange game of balancing where the passage from the present city to the recollected city—and this passage was as acrobatic as that of a man who throws himself from one bank to the other over a body of water that is normally impassable—did not so much reveal a nostalgia for places as it did the inerasable imprint of a state, that of the child I had been, projecting the power of love and the hope of life, of which it was the subject, over the most familiar and daily elements of its universe, like the streets, the houses, and the alleyways.
This ability to balance, my little supernatural power, the boundless belief in my vitality; I lost all of them irreversibly after Jan’s disappearance.
In the silence and the covering up, I began living in a city reduced to a single dimension, the one where Jan no longer existed. My secret cities were dead.
My body was empty, a thing that moved, covered in skin, equipped with eyes that saw, hands that consoled, a mouth that spoke. But nothing else moved, not organs, not thoughts, not beats, not pulsations, not circulation. Everything inside me was empty and immobile.
In the middle of the night, I opened my eyes. The little one had woken up. She was crying. Daniel had already gotten out of bed; he had sharp ears. I took her from his arms and held her against me. Exhausted, I babbled the same melody over and over. She looked at me, curled up against my warm body, her eyes wide open. I stroked her head in a constant movement, feeling the surface of her skull with light taps that supplied blood to my whole arm. The child was there, within easy reach of my hand that passed over and over her hair, as light as threads of silk. Finally, she let go and fell asleep. I put her back into bed and lay down next to her. Lifeless.
Jan had disappeared.
I waited on the red sofa, behind the shining railing, for the day to start and then for it to end. About every six hours, I fed the void. A bite for the child, a bite for the void. It was Daniel who grew thinner. He no longer had skin over his bones. He looked at me, worried, but didn’t say anything. Maybe he cried sometimes when he thought no one could hear. I knew that when I got into bed at night, begging for sleep, fading into it, Daniel remained lying next to me, eyes open. We had wasted our treasures of understanding, our common languages. All this time we could have held one another so close, interlocking our soul
s so completely, but we had used it up. That language, that silent chirping, there was nothing left of it anymore, no reserves. There was no longer any word or gesture except our bodies lying down and the sound of our breaths.
We sat across from each other. For the first time in weeks, my brain started moving; everything became perfectly clear when I told him about Jan. And immediately, though I had barely spoken the words, barely aligned the sentences, the storm fell down upon us. Immediately we found ourselves as helpless as two passengers each grabbing onto a piece of the hull on a boat destroyed by the swell. Powerless, and haunted by the inevitable sinking.
At the beginning we did try grasping each other’s hands, catching hold of each other, resisting. But closed inside my pain, as if inside a country with hermetic borders, I could not soften the effect of my own cruelty on Daniel. The only things that were possible: get up, sleep, eat, put one leg in front of the other. This is how we went along, week after week, month after month, each of us inside our sphere of suffering, inconsolable.
Daniel’s body shrank; he was losing strength. He would walk for hours to calm his nerves.
We were hypnotized by the brutal collapse. Occasionally, but always too late, one of us would try to break the state of paralysis and, by bracing ourselves on our memories, try to resist the current of deterioration.
It was no longer as much about memory, feelings, or psychology as it was about ethology: we were like lab rats exhibiting “freezing behavior” that stand still as if frozen in place in the face of a predator’s deadly threat, and within a few weeks, in our Montmartre bunker with the child who slept beside us, we had become for each other the incapacitated rat and the threatening predator.
My secret city had died, and with it all of the people like Daniel and Jan who had kept me out of evil’s reach.
I no longer had the strength for anything but murmured invocations.
JAN
JAN
DANIEL
JAN
DANIEL
DANIEL
JAN
DANIEL
JAN
It wasn’t as fun as Jules and Jim; the two first names suffocated in silence.
You got what you paid for, madame mademoiselle Bovary taking it one day at a time.
You, who had so perfectly waterproofed everything against the encyclopedias of misfortune.
But who ever told you that vicariously devouring disaster would protect you, huh? Who told you that? Nobody!
I for Icarus, I for idiot.
Me, little girl, miracle child, madame mademoiselle Bovary, a comforting gerontophile, a cruel and powerless rat.
It was the middle of my life’s journey and my seven-league boots had transformed into boots of lead.
I found myself alone again on the ice floe.
The little bijou no longer had any seawalls to protect her.
Nothing flowed naturally from the source anymore.
From a living source; fluids, words, visions.
Of course I continued walking down the streets, pressing myself against the buildings. I continued feeding my child, taking the métro, washing myself in the morning. But the envelope had disappeared; my organs had flown away, the blood, the vessels, the arteries, the bumps, the even bulge, the tick-tock of the heart. I had become a substance that was so fine, so colorless, that at any moment it could have been carried off by the slightest breath, the most insignificant bacteria. The surveyor’s friendliness had darkened; I was a wave endlessly agitated by a cold wind, so cold, against which I no longer had any protection.
Ah, look at her walk, the unconsoled, in her discovered weakness that arrives, boom, right into her head like a revelation. Ha! She thought she was so well-sheltered, burrowed behind yards and yards of high walls, she’s the one who grew under the loving looks. Ha! Look at her dissolving and coming undone now that they’ve disappeared, now that the looks have turned away.
Princess of Aquitaine, your tower is gone, your star has died. You are no longer even dragging a body through the streets, just haphazardly molded matter.
Marianne, they say, is your name. Brown eyes, it would appear.
One night, you make a discovery. The matter has woken up, it is cut completely open to the bone, crying out, unbearable. And you talk to the matter, you console it, you make yourself into a mother for it, you reassure it. You say that the matter shouldn’t be afraid of the abyss, that the matter should calm down, that there’s hope and that it should fall asleep. And the matter falls asleep. It probably understood that there is no one else but you to take care of it.
But the miracle doesn’t happen again. Too much effort. The matter is sucked backward, its destruction and non-advent already programmed.
Until then I had been a good little bijou who was very much alive, but I was almost forty years old and I wanted to die.
I had to look under the green liquid mass; I had to look under the sludge and sink down, body outstretched, and absorb the water. Let my tangled hair hang over my shoulders, let my tangled hair hang over my eyes and face.
Get used to the mass of hair, get used to the mass of water. Let myself soak, envelop, and leave on tiptoe for the water’s end, toward its down-below.
Travel through the water without flapping my arms or legs.
Accept the coughing and spitting and the cold everywhere along my body.
I looked around me at the surface of the water, the bits of floating wood, and the lacy shrubs and bushes on the surrounding banks. On the other side, all the way up the hill and at regular intervals, the trees soared upward with every inch of their trunks. Their black branches, immaculate, were stretched toward the sky. They were a woeful army of comrades.
They were cold, cold, cold. I was cold, and I felt my feet going numb in the water.
The world was deserted.
All my faces had disappeared behind the tracery of trunks and branches. They were sunken, swallowed up, and my body was no longer inside my body.
It had become a naked tree, a branch.
The hills and trails were swallowed up with everything else around my living body, the one that walked in step, at a trot, or at a gallop to the beat of my heart and the blood pounding in my head. From my side of the water, I saw it in front of me: the sweep of naked trees, the sorrowful army of comrades.
It, that, I shiver against the branches raised to the sky and the earth all around and the fragile expanse of water. I, that, it moves to the middle of the water.
The sound of silence: my long breath mixed with the wind.
I remembered hills and trails, the hardness of the sun, dreamed faces that floated superimposed on the dazzling green of meadows, brown ridges of cut lavender on the hillside, the lone horse that had turned its head to watch me pass. I remembered the gray building façades in Paris and my eyes glued to the rows of balustrades.
Everything had to be numbed, and the suffering reduced to silence, in the cold water and the naked trees. I just had to let myself drift to the middle of the water, between the two banks.
And then I remembered the Atlantis.
We were sailing over the green water of the Dordogne in a steep-sided valley between hills set on each of the two banks. Daniel, the little one, and I were on the boat, squeezed in amid the vacationers. We heard the guide’s voice crackling over the loudspeakers installed on the deck. He was commenting on the fauna, the flora, the construction of dams, the efforts of the men who had tamed the river. The tourists were in agreement, rapturous. The children were rejoicing. In their summer clothes they jumped on top of the chairs, ran from one end of the boat to the other, and leaned over the steel railings under the shouts of mothers who snatched them back, screaming. The mothers couldn’t understand that the children were intoxicated by the movement of the boat, and that as colored spots they were the extension of the warm air, grassy slopes, and clear sky that accompanied us on our promenade.
Like the others, the little one was frolicking. She formed alliances
with children she didn’t know, and all it took was a look or a hand signal to initiate a mute fraternity of corresponding laws that would appear opaque to adult sociabilities. I was sitting apart, on a wooden bench overlooking the water. I felt the sun’s fire against my chest, and the humid freshness of the river on my face. The guide had been quiet for ten minutes, as if even he had been worn out by his spiel. The adults dozed; the boat kept moving.
Then the nasal voice returned, asking us to summon all of our attention to look down, very far down, under the reflections bouncing gently on top of the water. We were—and here the guide’s voice became mysterious, almost intimate—on top of the ruins of a village that had been swallowed up by the water. He launched into explanations detailing the technical data retrieved by diving expeditions that had been organized over the last few years to bring some of the scattered debris back to the open air. A piece of the church bell and the blacksmith’s tools were, at present, the only evidence of the village’s centuries-old existence. But, he assured us, the outline of the hamlet had remained intact: the main street, church square, and side roads.
Silence had fallen over the group of passengers, and even the children stayed calmly beside their parents as if each one were trying to make out the village’s unmoving presence under the smooth surface of the water. My little one was afraid; she was worried she’d see the bodies of drowned people emerge around the boat.
I scanned the water like the others and felt the presence beneath us of eroded stones, chipped low walls, waving aquatic plants, and the quick movements of fish. And in every part of my body—my hands holding Daniel’s, my feet, my legs stretched out on the wooden bench, my neck and hair warmed in the sun, my gaze wandering between the water and my little one’s white skin shining in the light—I discovered something like a piece that was needed to complete this landscape organized in layers from the most obvious to the most invisible, from the highest up to the deepest underwater.
The Department of Missing Persons Page 11